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without being obvious. Newspaper editors were so eager for American news that they would take his manufactured “letters from a traveler” and rework them to appear as editorials or reportage.29 One of Hotze’s favorite methods was to supply an acquaintance with fresh information in the shape of a pro-South editorial that required little editing. If the article was printed, Hotze would always insist that the submitter keep the ten-guinea fee. For the moment, Hotze was concentrating on two themes that he thought would resonate with English readers: the needless suffering of cotton workers, and the “blood” relationship between the Southern gentry and their British cousins.30

Henry Adams thought the tone of the Index was “so excruciatingly never conquer” that “one is forced to the belief that they think themselves very near that last ditch.”31 He discounted the Confederates’ methods at his peril, however. Thurlow Weed, Seward’s emissary, was not a “clubbable” man in the English sense, and Grub Street hacks prided their independence too much to accept his money.32 He was an expert at pulling the more vulgar levers of corruption, but the subtle game of co-opting English journalists had eluded him. When Weed departed from England at the beginning of June, it was with a sense of regret that he had only partially fulfilled his mission. On a personal level, he was confident that his conversations with various editors and politicians had disabused them of the more pernicious myths about Seward. On the other hand, Weed knew that his efforts to establish a Northern lobby similar to Henry Hotze’s stable of propagandists and opinion formers had failed.

There was more disappointment for Weed once he arrived home and discovered that his control over the New York press had slipped during his absence. His views on Britain had mellowed during his time abroad, yet he found editors resistant to the idea of adopting a more benign view of Anglo-American relations. Bravely, Weed took on the burden himself and published an open letter to New York City’s Common Council in which he urged his countrymen to reconsider their hostility to England. Regarding the Trent affair, “I am bound,” he asserted, “in truth and fairness, to say, that that Government and people sincerely believed that we desired a rupture with them, that we sought occasion to taunt and snub them.” Moreover, America’s recent behavior toward Britain included supporting Russia in the Crimean War, the expulsion of the British minister on a technicality, and Seward’s oft-repeated claim that one day Canada would belong to the United States: “Some of these grounds of complaint were, as we know, well taken.” He begged his fellow New Yorkers to remember that “the Union has many ardent, well-wishing friends in England, and can have many more if we act justly ourselves.”33

Though wise and admirably sane, Weed’s letter failed to address the intense bitterness caused by The Times and other newspapers. Edward Dicey was disconcerted when he visited the house of a Northern acquaintance who forced him to gaze at the portrait of a young man. “ ‘How,’ he said to me, ‘would you like, yourself, to read constantly that that lad died in a miserable cause, and, as an American officer, should be called a coward?’ ” Dicey admitted that “I could make no adequate reply.”34 The fact that many American newspapers were just as rude about Britain was a rather hollow argument in the face of such grief.35 The U.S. consul in Paris, John Bigelow, warned Lord Russell that it made Americans deeply resentful to learn from the British press “that we are barbarians, that our system of government is a nuisance, that our statesmen are knaves or imbeciles.”36 The British consulate in New York noticed that ordinary Britons suffered every time there was a controversy in the press, and Lord Edward St. Maur wrote home about a new term being bandied about the city: “Anglo-Rebels.”37

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Despite Butler’s offensive “Woman Order,” the MP William Schaw Lindsay was discovering just how difficult it could be to turn goodwill in Parliament